


plain jane hollstein

by magykal_fangirl



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, Hollstein - Freeform, also this is a rough draft with no beta reader, and i like this better, as usual, askskakdksldksbdks aaa, i started over, i'm trying my best to get back into writing so any motivation would be heckin awesome, pls like it, so here ya go, the hollstein is strong in this one, the next part won't take long to upload, this'll probably be a two or three parter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-28
Packaged: 2020-02-04 10:37:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18602806
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magykal_fangirl/pseuds/magykal_fangirl
Summary: hollstein first season, laura first person pova couple things are changed like sequence of events but that's mostly because i'm too lazy to go back and watch to see when things happenif there are any glaring mistakes pls tell me





	1. chap one aka i can't think of chapter names

**Author's Note:**

> i'm sorry

College started differently than I’d thought it would. I’d expected a nice roommate who’d motivate me to write lit papers and we’d tell each other not to stay up too late. We’d balance each other out and she’d be a good influence on me and I’d teach her the ins and outs of nerd culture. Yeah, that didn’t happen. 

My roommate was nice but she wasn’t exactly the academic type. Betty Spielsdorf was her name and instead of motivating me to work on my lit papers, she was motivating me to attend parties. How there were parties this early in the school year, I didn’t know. She stayed up later than me most nights — a mighty feat — and didn’t  _ really _ pay attention when I talked about Doctor Who.

However, I could deal with that. She’d be a good influence on me by introducing me to the world of people other than me and my dad. Unfortunately for me, that meant stepping outside of my comfort bubble.  _ Way _ out.

“The quad mixer’s tonight,” she was saying. “You  _ have _ to come.”

My lit paper was due in fifteen hours. I hadn’t started it. It required at least two hours of research and it was probably a good idea to sleep at some point. 

“I can’t, I have to work on this,” I said. It was no use. 

“If you actually wanted to work on your lit paper, the open document wouldn’t be blank and named “my dumb lit paper”,” Betty reasoned.

The morning after the party I woke up to the six o’clock alarm I’d set the night before. And the six fifteen one I’d set to keep myself from sleeping in. I yawned and rubbed the sleep from my eyes. Thank god I hadn’t had any of the punch at the party ― I really didn’t want to write my lit paper hungover. I turned on my light and settled down at my laptop.

Four hours later I was seated criss cross applesauce on my chair, a donut in hand, straining my eyesight, still working on my lit paper. It had to be the worst writing I’d ever written. Thank god we didn’t have to turn things in online the night before class.

My class started at eleven which I’d thought was a reasonable hour to have class at the time I’d been choosing them. My dad had said I was lucky to get a class that late as a freshman. Silas sure had benefits over other universities when the risk of accidentally walking into a haunted building was higher than the risk of failing out. 

I figured I’d wake Betty up right before I left for class, considering she didn’t go to class even when she wasn’t incredibly hungover. I guess getting a roommate  _ had _ made me more responsible, if for the wrong reasons. Whatever. Dad would still be proud. I hadn’t even eaten cookies as a main meal in a month. Hopefully that alone would be enough to make my dad warm up to the idea of me spending all four years here. 

Betty was gone. She’d disappeared. Poof. No trace. There were only pillows left in her spot. My phone rang and I quickly turned it off and threw it onto my bed. I couldn’t talk to my dad when my roommate had just disappeared. 

I tried to recall what had happened at the mixer. We’d arrived together but Betty had split off from me soon after to get alcohol running through her system. She’d offered to get me a cup too but I’d refused. 

I remembered seeing Betty at least a few times throughout the night. Once when she was playing beer pong with my lit ta and another time when she accidentally bumped into me as she was getting another cup of punch. I’d found her around eleven to tell her I was leaving and to come home before four, and that’s the last thing I remembered. 

I wrote this all down in an old notebook I’d found in the bottom of my suitcase. I needed all the facts and witness reports I could get, even if that included my own. 

It turned out my report was the only one with any actual information. Everybody else I talked to either didn’t seem to care or thought she’d been with me. Even Perry, the floor don, didn’t know, though that was mainly because she’d left before I had. It was time for more investigation; a sweep of our room and the quad was in order. 

One sweep of our room later and I’d uncovered a piece of evidence. Granted it now had my dna all over it, but still evidence. Perry’s friend LaFontaine was good with sciencey stuff, so I let them go at it. Maybe they could find some non-Laura fingerprints. 

The piece of evidence had been a card, slightly larger than a three by five index card, with disgusting goop all over it. That hadn’t been the weirdest part about it, though. On the card, it’d said that Betty no longer attended Silas. Which was crazy, right? That had to require paperwork or some statement from the parents or  _ something _ , right? And it would certainly take longer than one night to go from living there and going to parties to no longer attending. It seemed I was the only one worried about it, as every phone call I made resulted in me being on hold or being told to calm down. At one point, the person on the other end of the line started trying to set me up with a new roommate but I quickly shut that down. I had a roommate already. And I was going to find her.

Silas sure worked quick, because I got my new roommate the next day.  _ Carmilla _ . She also didn’t seem to care at all that my prior roommate had gone missing and instead stuck to ridiculing my investigation and stealing Betty’s stuff. By the middle of the third day after Betty disappeared, her stuff had been removed and replaced with Carmilla’s. The once mostly clean dorm room transformed into her own personal trash can and I became her least favorite person. The second part was fine ― the feeling was certainly mutual.

A week into our sharing a room, I came back from lunch with LaF and Perry. I didn’t have class until two pm, and Carmilla slept like the dead and didn’t usually wake up until four ― I sometimes wondered if she even had class ― so we decided to come back to my room. Surprisingly she wasn’t there. I used that opportunity to throw all her laundry on her bed so at least my half of the room looked okay. I stole my yellow pillow back as well. 

“Is this the first time she’s left the room?” LaF asked as Perry looked around at the mess in disgust.

“She leaves at night I think?” I said. Occasionally I’d woken up late at night to an empty room.

“Okay, but the first time while you’re fully awake,” LaF said, more confirming than asking.

I nodded, and their smile widened. Perry started shaking her head. 

“Susan, whatever you’re thinking, no.”

“It’s LaFontaine,” they corrected, looking away from Perry, “and my idea is wonderful, hear me out.”

Perry shook her head again. “I’m going to leave before you get into any trouble. Laura can you keep her in check?”

LaF winced at the pronoun but didn’t correct her. I nodded to Perry as she left. As soon as the door closed, they started to grin wickedly.

“Is there anything of Carmilla’s that she would miss? We could totally, accidentally, disappear it. Poof,” they explained before I could ask.

I smiled. “I know just the thing.”

I pointed LaF to the minifridge where Carmilla kept her soy milk. She’d written “MINE” across it in red marker. It seemed just a bit possessive, but all the more reason to disappear it. I was tired of her stealing all my things. It was time for payback.

“It was just food coloring and corn syrup. Learn to take a joke, will you?”

“It looked like blood! Blood! Do you know how terrible it is to pour a carton of soy milk into cereal and then it looks like blood?!?!”

“Well you shouldn’t have touched it. I wrote right on there that it was mine. I thought Journalism majors knew how to read.”

I groaned, insulted her outfit, and stormed out with LaFontaine to go to their room, fuming all the way.

The following week was tenser than usual, and that was saying something. Carmilla now left before I got back from dinner and stayed asleep the rest of the time. I barely had any chance to talk to her. It was nice, though. I deserved a break from her. Unfortunately, her avoiding me didn’t stop her from stealing my yellow pillow and the occasional take out Chinese food from me. 

On the positive side of things, LaF and Perry had found some leads on why Betty had gone missing. They’d been asking around and had stumbled into two girls who had disappeared as well, but unlike Betty, they had reappeared a day or two later, with no recollection of those days. The day I questioned them just so happened to be the day Carmilla decided to stay in the room all day reading, so the interview did not go as planned and was cut off because of my dumb roommate’s interference and insensibility. 

After hearing about their experiences and about the freaky dreams they’d both had before disappearing, I decided it was best I go hang out in a sunny area with lots of people and no dark alleyways and eat some well deserved cookies. My imagination was going to run wild that night and I wanted to postpone the thinking about creepy girls in white dresses as long as possible.

I was biting into my third cookie when I saw my lit ta. I ate the rest as fast as I could and swallowed it down with a glass of milk.

“Danny!” I called.

She turned to look at me and I could see her fallen face as she trudged over.

“Hey, Laura,” she said as she sat down, her eyes still darting around the quad as if looking for something. “Have you seen Elsie by any chance?”

“Carmilla’s friend?” I asked. I didn’t think they’d been actual friends but I didn’t know how to eloquently phrase what they’d really been.

Danny tilted her head in confusion at that. “I don’t think so? But she’s the only Elsie I know of, so maybe.”

“I haven’t seen her though, sorry. Why?” I asked, though I was pretty sure I already had the answer.

“She didn’t come to today’s Summer Society meeting, even though she signed the blood oath at the beginning of the year and she didn’t even send in an advance notice of absence. That’s not like her.”

I filed away the Summer Society blood oath as something to look into at a different time.

“Did you check with her roommate? Maybe she’s in bed, sick?” I so hoped it wasn’t what I thought it was.

“Oh wow, hadn’t thought of that,” snapped Danny, then she sighed. “Sorry, I’m just worried.”

I nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out for her.”

Danny nodded, already back into searching for Elsie mode. “Bye, Laura,” she said, and stood up from the table. I waited a few seconds after she left, eating another cookie, before getting up too and walking back to my dorm room. I’d had enough of the outside. I crossed my fingers Carmilla wouldn’t be there.

She wasn’t. Granted, it was almost six, so she’d probably gone to get dinner or something, like a normal person. I’d had so many cookies, I wasn’t hungry for dinner, so I just sat in my bed, alone with my thoughts. 

Four girls, missing.

Two girls, returned but amnesiac.

What the heck was going on at Silas?


	2. chap 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> laura has a dream ooo

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm sorry

I woke up in a sweat with no memory of what dream I’d been having. The room was pitch black — not even the light from under the door cut through the darkness. I wiped the sweat off my brow, my breaths still coming quicker normal. I made some attempts to breathe slower and after a few minutes I was fine. My face still felt weird and groggy, so I tried to get up to go splash my face with water, but I couldn’t get out of bed and my eyes still hadn’t adjusted to the dark. 

Something started to ooze out of the ceiling and at first I thought it was a leak, but my dorm room was on the second floor of four and it hadn’t leaked even during the big rainstorm a couple weeks ago. It looked too thick to be water, and I realized too late that if I could see it, the room was no longer completely pitch black. I looked around the room to get a better sense of my surroundings and whilst doing so, I saw a figure in a billowing white dress. It was a girl, around my age, with dark hair and pale skin and she was saying something that I couldn’t quite hear. White noise filled the room and the wind picked up, so her shouts were drowned out before they reached me.

She disappeared and the room swirled a little, knocking me to lie back down in bed. I sat up and looked at the ceiling and walls which were still oozing the mysterious substance, but now the light from under the door reflected off it and it glowed a dark, muddy red. Blood. The room swirled again, this time faster, and I was knocked down again. 

When I opened my eyes, the blood was gone, but something still felt off.  _ Something was under my bed _ . I didn’t know how I could sense it, but I could, and it felt like I was back in my four year old body, swearing to my dad that there was a monster under the bed, so convinced in the thought, that nothing would quench the fear but my dad. This time there was  _ really _ something under my bed, and my dad wasn’t here. I shut my eyes tighter to try to go to sleep and wake up in the real world. It was no use. I had to fight my own monsters now.

I leapt from my bed to far enough away that I hoped the  _ thing _ wouldn’t be able to get me. I scrambled through my dresser drawers for the bag my dad had made me pack. Hopefully, bear spray would work on monsters, too. The room turned to black before I could get to it.

… 

I woke up with vague memories of the dream, but the ever haunting memory of the fear I’d had. The room was now engulfed in light from the window, so I quickly checked under the bed. Nothing except my extra cookies. I made sure none had been taken and ate one for my nerves.

I looked over to the other bed, but Carmilla wasn’t there. I half hoped she would be, just so I didn’t have to be alone. I checked my phone for the time and figured ten would be a reasonable time to go over to LaF and Perry’s to try to sleep more soundly. After the creepy dream, I was worn out. I took my phone, then debated bringing bear spray. I pocketed it. Best to be safe. I made sure all the lights and water were turned off and my key was in my pocket before closing and locking the door and walking down the hall to the more welcoming room.

I could hear faint voices as I got closer to their room. I realized LaF was yelling once I arrived. Their voice had gone a bit higher pitched and strained. Perry talked in a low, calm voice, and somehow that was worse.

“You’re my best friend! I want you to be supportive of me the entire way! Is that too much to ask?” LaF was saying.

Perry stayed silent, and when LaF continued, it was with a shaky, quiet, broken voice.

“You’re my best friend, Perry.”

It sounded like LaF was moving to the door to leave, so I used the entirety of my energy to sprint back down the hall and back into my room. Somehow during the past couple minutes I’d been gone, Carmilla had appeared.

“What’s got  _ you _ coming here in such a hurry?” she droned out. “I thought you were looking for ways to avoid me.”

Already out of breath and tense from hearing LaF and Perry’s conversation, I couldn’t help myself from bursting out, “ _ Me _ ? Avoiding  _ you _ ? If anything, it’s the other way around. You’re never here and when you are, you actively avoid talking with me and your form of communication is stealing my food and leaving clothes on the ground and hair in the shower drain. I know it’s not in the realm of possibility for you to be a decent person, but try to be a tolerable  _ roommate _ at least.” I sighed and lay down on my bed. I didn’t look up when Carmilla left the room.

She came back a couple days later, around four pm, looking absolutely exhausted.

“Jeez, when was the last time you slept?”

She held up a finger to indicate that I was supposed to wait. She laughed. “Just under twenty seven hours.” She sounded drunk.

I sighed, but I wasn’t one to talk. I was still recovering from the creepy dream and I hadn’t gone to sleep until dawn multiple times. I was barely surviving on hot cocoa, sugar, and fear. I hoped she couldn’t tell.

“You should sleep,” I said, without knowing why.

“So I’m out of your hair?” she asked, and chuckled. “Figures.”

“No. So you get sleep. You look like crap, you know that, right?”

“Thanks, Cupcake,” she said, then passed out on her bed.

I looked down at the cupcake I was eating. I shook my head. Of course she’d forget my name while completely out of it.

I had another dream that night, but this time there was no girl in white or blood dripping from the ceiling. The thing was still under my bed, though, and this time it ventured out and I could make out a dark shape that resembled a large animal. Maybe bear spray  _ would _ be useful. The rest of the dream was a blur of dark shapes and conversations I couldn’t quite make out.

“Black as the Pit and terrible as the night was Bagheera,” I woke up saying.

It was still dark and I guessed it to be around three in the morning. I couldn’t recall the dream I’d been having, but my heart raced, so I assumed it’d been another creepy one. I took in a deep breath to calm myself.

“Bad dream?” And there was Carmilla. Of course she was up at three in the morning.

I looked over to where I’d heard her voice. She was curled up in the window, the moonlight illuminating her face. The window was slightly open and the breeze blew in and ruffled her hair. She only wore a tank top, shorts, and her signature boots, and I wondered why her skin didn’t prickle with goose bumps. She didn’t seem to even notice the cold.

She continued looking up at the sky as she said, “You were dreaming about your Kipling reading.”

I nodded, forgetting that she couldn’t see too long after. We sat in silence for what could have been an hour. She sighed and I realized this was the most content I’d seen her since she’d moved in. I broke the silence.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking at the stars. It’s comforting, knowing that all of us, our actions and feelings and problems, are so infinitesimal, when compared to that light.”

I got out of bed, taking my blanket, and walked over to awkwardly hover over her. I spoke softly so she wouldn’t be startled.

“That’s the most Philosophy major thing I’ve ever heard you say,” I said, and she hummed in acknowledgment. “I think it’s all sort of depressing to think of the world in that way,” I added, more to myself.

She chuckled. “Good thing you’re not a Philosophy major. We’re all this depressing.”

She paused and we stayed silent for another couple minutes, listening to everything around us. When we weren’t talking I could hear the wind rustling through the trees and the white noise that came from living in a building. I heard a few birds who didn’t know that it wasn’t time yet to get up ― or maybe it was, I didn’t know how long I’d been standing there. I figured that this was the first real conversation I’d had with my roommate, and I wanted to keep it going in the hopes that maybe next time we saw each other in daylight we wouldn’t want to kill each other.

“What do you find so comforting about it?”

It was a flimsy question, and I thought maybe she knew it too, but neither of us cared ― nobody really cared about anything at three in the morning. She sighed and gestured for me to sit down in the window with her. I did and our legs became entwined. Her legs were cold and I instinctively brought my blanket to rest on them.

“If nothing matters to them,” she said, and pointed to the stars, “then all that matters is the connections you make with people that your actions  _ do _ matter to.”

I nodded, not understanding but wanting her to keep going.

“Do what  _ you _ want to do, make connections with people  _ you _ want to make connections with, read books  _ you _ want to read, love who  _ you _ want to love.” Her eyes were focused on mine, so intense, so passionate, I felt I had to look away, but I didn’t. She was sort of beautiful this way.

I nodded.

We sat in silence again.

The wind came in through the cracked window and I shivered, bringing the blanket closer around me.

“You should go back to sleep.”

Her voice was so soft I could barely hear it. I probably wouldn’t have had we not been sitting so close.

I nodded a minute later and got up. As I walked back to my bed, I heard her shut the window. I climbed into bed, my mind somehow racing and standing still at the same time, bits of our conversation repeating over and over in my head.

A few minutes later, Carmilla tossed my yellow pillow to me and I adjusted myself so I was hugging it. I muttered a “Thanks” and fell asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so it's still not finished  
> this'll probably be around three or four chapters now?  
> i'll post the next chapter soon, don't worry

**Author's Note:**

> i'm still sorry  
> visit my tumblr i'm random-artsy-space-dork  
> also i will write more even if it's not of this work  
> but this will get finished  
> i promise  
> i swear on my three dead cats


End file.
